Difference between Quora and Yahoo Answers

We all need answers to questions that we have in life. People think that children ask a lot of questions, but adults have a lot more questions. The more you know, the more you don’t know. It’s reasons like this, that people have Q&A websites cropping up and today we’ll compare the two most popular of them all.

Yahoo Answers Vs Quora

The state of Yahoo answers can be summarized with one single Image.

On their homepage, they have in the featured content section, an article that is connected to December. This shows how serious Yahoo takes Yahoo answers. A billion dollar company does not update its content that is close to 5 months old (Article written in November, 2015).

Quora started in 2009 by Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever stands for (Qu)estions (or) (A)nswers.

Quality of the content

The quality of content is much higher on Quora compared to that of Yahoo answers. This can be answered with the simple fact that many Quora answers are published in top publications like Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur and more. Yahoo answers pretty much have questions that are very personal and are simple content.

The stark difference between Quora’s content and Yahoo Answer’s content is for the latter, you ask a question pertaining to your situation and you leave the site, but with Quora the questions are very generic, informative and highly valuable. So Quora has transitioned into more of a social network where people spend time and on Yahoo, it’s more like a movie purchasing website, you visit the website for a purpose and you leave immediately.

Content is everything for a Q&A website and it is very clear that Quora wins any day. But what were the mistakes made by Yahoo answers that gave Quora an edge?

Quality Users

Yahoo answers did not go behind acquiring quality people. A website which has answers contributed by people, then the quality of the people is important. Quora made sure they attracted the smartest people from the Silicon Valley to initially participate. This is the reason why the content is still Startup heavy. By attracting quality people, Quora became a place where quality answers were provided for genuine and smart questions.

Not a Social Website

Yahoo did not keep up with the times. Yahoo answers, is just a forum at the end of the day. They did not give importance to their users who contributed quality and genuine answers by having a follow button. They did not help curate their user’s feeds by making users choose their favorite topics or people. If everybody’s experience is the same on a website, then you stand to lose especially from a social perspective.

We spoke about this is in one of our articles, where existing companies will not be able to match the DNA of a new company who’s thought comes from a very different perspective. Yahoo is a dying company that has not been led by able leaders in at least a decade. They have no clue about what works for them or how to Innovate and because of this Quora has a superior advantage compared to that of Yahoo answers.

Kishen is a serial entrepreneur and marketer. He started his entrepreneurial journey with a Web Development company called Vanadium. He also has written multiple books on Marketing, Conversion optimization, Facebook marketing and More.